By the Sword - Richard Cohen

Is there any weapon in the whole of recorded history that has had more emotional and physical impact than the sword? Oh sure, guns punch neat holes in things, maces and grenades both make a decided mess and bows of all varieties can turn a man into a veritable pincushion with disdainful ease, but none of these have the damned elegance of a sword. So is there another of the same calibre? I don't think so. Neither does Richard Cohen.

Once again this man is unrivalled proof that the best books about a subject are ones written by those who know a bit about it. Cohen is a 5 time UK champion with the sabre and made the Olympic team 4 times running, he's also an editor and article publisher so he knows how to write clearly and concisely about the weapon that so fascinates him.
He needs to as well, beacause the history of the sword can really be said to be the history of civilisation - or at least the greater part of it. It's surprising just how many of the world's movers and shakers have been or are swordsmen; Churchill, Shakespeare, Karl Marx, Grace Kelly, Washington, Mussolini, Michelangelo and Voltaire amongst them. President Truman fought for his wife (if he won, she'd marry him, if she beat him then he was out the door), most others fought for their lives.

Cohen gives us first a potted history of swordplay and it's eventual morphing into fencing (though still covering 4 chapters and a hundred pages) from the earliest Ancient times right through to Waterloo; dropping some surprising diversions along the way and mentioning any number of things and episodes affected by the blade - the military salute amongst them.
The second part is chiefly concerned with how a sword is actually fashioned and the techniques and history of smithing (it takes 82 seperate acts to turn a steel bar into a fencing sabre)with emphasis given to the famed schools of Damascus and Toledo and the master sword of them all: the Japanese Katana.
The third is slightly more distateful in these supposedly enlightened times; when a man's honour and position in society depended more on his sword arm than his innate worth, a period that lasted for about two hundred years in Europe and also includes the Samurai code as well. Part 4 also dovetails neatly into this part of history as well so needs little oversight.

So much for past history. With parts 5 and 6 Cohen brings the sword and fencing into the modern age - the Olympics and exhibition bouts. The developments of technology that resulted in the spectacle that we recognise from TV today, all flashing blades, stamping feet and screeching markers, are fully explored as well as the schools and masters that taught in them and had just as much of an impact on things as their illustrious forebears. In fact in an age of nuclear weapons, battle tanks, artillery and aircraft the simple yet highly complex sword has perhaps more exposure now than it has ever done; when a man's worth is decided by his skill and not by how many he has killed.

It's never boring though; I found myself turning pages avidly from 10 o'clock last night and when I looked up again it was 5 this morning! This book sucks you in with its lively and engaging style - well worth getting as much for entertainment as factual knowledge.

7 and 3/4's out of 10.

Ivan's War - Catherine Merridale

"Whenever people think that they will have to fight a war, they start to imagine what it will be like"

This is the fist line of Merridale's book and, if you were writing a synopsis about it, this isn't a bad place to start. War is ultimately a story of people after all. During the Second World War, every nation's soldiers were characterised by a stereotype for good or ill that was used as shorthand both by themselves and usually those on the opposite side; the British soldier was Tommy, an American Joe (regardless of his actual first name). Germans were universally known as Fritz. The Russian infantryman was Ivan. Ivan Ivanovich to give him his full title.

The Red Army was probably the most diverse conglomeration that saw action during what they refer to as the Great Patriotic War; conscripts from the Urals and Siberia rubbed shoulders with Poles, Tatars, Cossacks, Ukrainians, Georgians, Muscovites and half a hundred other satellite nations. Conscripts, volunteers, the sweepings of the Gulag, forced servicemen from liberated countries, commissars and officers, all had their part to play in what became the largest military force known to mankind since Antiquity; a veritable Juggernaut of men and steel that rolled over everything in it's path on the march to Berlin.

Or at least that's the popular view. Where Merridale scores is her ability to coax stories and reminiscences from men who in the most part are trying very hard to forget them. Because of this talent and the time devoted to it we are presented with something long overdue; the opinions and feelings of soldiers from other nations during war are well known and a matter of public record - but the Soviet soldier was silent. Stalinism and then general communism expected, nay, demanded, nothing less. The greatest myth of the New Soviet Man was that he didn't have a voice of his own. Well, this book gives the lie to that assumption. Whilst there are the normal periods of Stalinist reticence (how could there be otherwise? that was all these men knew) there are more patches that reveal the true men under the bluff shroud.

Merridale guides us through every moment of life on the Eastern Front from the crushing defeats of scared and confused Ivans in the first days of Operation Barbarossa, to the tough, hardy force that kicked in the gates of Germany and then proceeded to wreak absolute havoc. But she never loses sight of her original statement and thus we are neatly brought full circle by the last lines.

"They don't talk very much. They don't seem to need to. Sometimes they just stand and weep."

8 and 3/4's out of 10

Red Storm Rising - Tom Clancy

Time for a little diversion this morning; Clancy has always woven some element of military action into all of his bestselling 'Jack Ryan' series, Hunt for Red October and Sum of All Fears being cases in point but he always has a load of political/moral baggage getting in the way; to the extent that sometimes you wonder what Clancy might be able to produce were he to break away from Ryan for a moment and go all out to do the job properly. Well, he did and the result is Red Storm.

There's no Jack Ryan, no CIA, very little politics, little dead wood, just 725 pages of action, strategy and humanity that rattles along at a fantastic pace. The scenario is that hoary old favourite of World War 3, except Clancy decides to do things slightly differently; no nuclear weapons and their attendant mega-death count, this is a conventional war fought with conventional weapons in conventional style. Set in the 1980's this is a classical study of why a nation goes to war - usually because the blokes in charge fear war less than the consequences of no war. In this case the ignition point (quite literally) is a terrorist strike on the Soviet Union's chief oil production and refining fields. Faced with slow strangulation and unwilling to reveal their weakness to the West by asking for help, the Communists decide that there is plenty of oil in the Persian Gulf. All they need to do is march in and take it.

Problem: NATO will kick up a stink.
Answer: Okay, we'll trash NATO first, then.

And so it begins, with the curtain raiser being the exquisite Operation: Polar Glory. Clancy really lets his imagination and experience loose in this one by taking a handful of individuals on both sides and letting them just get on with the business of fighting a war instead of chaining them down with a lot of baggage that detracts from the story. We go from Atlantic convoy duty to armoured divisions fencing in Germany to the escapades of a group on the run in Iceland to underwater SSN operations and back to the convoys in a repetitive cycle, but within that cycle the episodes are rotated, so that nothing appears formulaic and thus boring.

Clancy displays a panache that is sometimes woefully missing from his other works, concentrating on action on the frontlines instead of plans in musty offices. There is some of the latter of course because soldiers uniformly do some hard thinking before they hazard their lives, but only as much as necessary to set the scene and tone - the naval engagements are the best by far, including the aforementioned operation, tense sub-hunting and a Soviet strike on the Nimitz.

There's only one problem I have with this book, as indeed with all Clancy's works; he seems to have succumbed to the Hollywood Disease, also known as the 'Saving Private Ryan' syndrome. By this I mean that all Europeans (particularly we Brits) are displayed as bumbling idiotic cowards who have to be rescued by the smart, sharp, tough Yanks - and since this comes through in all his books, one suspects that this is Clancy's personal view instead of 'getting into character' as it were. A tendancy to tar everyone not under the Stars and Stripes with the same brush is irritating at best and explosively infuriating at worst; I know that Clancy is primarily writing for an American audience and I also accept that we on the other side of the Pond are not uniformly the sharpest tools in the box. But then again, there are many in the Land of the Free (tm) who ain't exactly swift in the head either. There's an institutional arrogance that's very grating and somewhat misplaced should he have bothered to do a little checking. For example Europeans are said to

Know beans about handguns

All fine and dandy except that the US military uses the Beretta (Italian) and the Secret Service (Presidential bodyguard) uses the SigSaur that comes from Germany!

Thus there's an overwhelming urge to scream Get it right at the most basic of levels. Dopn't let my agonised ravings put you off, though. This is a class way to spend a few hours.

7 out of 10.

Gunpowder - Clive Ponting

It's surely the nastiest and most uncomfortable irony in all of recorded (and probably unrecorded) human history; the discovery of gunpowder was prompted by alchemists searching for the Elixir of Life....

It seems only fair, what with China in resurgence these days, that we pause for a moment and give due praise to Chinese ingenuity. Not only did they discover what happens when you mix charcoal, saltpetre and sulphur in the correct proportions but they subsequently developed the great majority of what we arrogant Westerners consider to have been 'our' greatest military advances - they had bombs, incendiaries, rockets, landmines, cannon and guns a thousand years before the rest of us stopped bashing each other with metal sticks. Directly or indirectly they actually dragged the rest of us kicking and fighting into the modern age whilst we clung to swords and spears screaming at the top of our lungs that we didn't want to go. In fact it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to note that China has already attacked the USA, albeit indirectly; their gunpowder rockets were refined by Tipoo Sultan of India to give the 18th century Redcoats a tricky time of it; recognising a good thing when we saw it we Brits subsequently used them to shell the rebellious North Americans. Thus giving the world the "Star Spangled Banner" with the line in the rocket's red glare.

Sorry.

Clive Ponting goes in depth to explore the history and the spread of this outwardly innocuous substance; starting in China (where it was a state secret for 400 years on pain of instant death) and moving to the Muslim world where the rest of us got a taste of just how powerful this thing really was - the triple walls of Constantinople had gone unchalleneged for a hundred years and more, until in 1453 the Ottomans bashed holes in them within 7 days. India also got it's rude introduction to modernity thanks to the Mughals - of whom the aforementioned Tipoo was one. From the East it then hit Europe and, thanks to us, crushed both Inca and Aztec empires, freed a continent and enslaved another one before returning East and giving the Samurai of Japan a nasty surprise. Perhaps one of the first examples of an invention that had truly global impact.

Ponting's achievement is in turning what might have been just another dry textbook about a handful of dry chemicals into something that could capture the imagination of any schoolboy; each chaper deals with a specific application of the "fire drug". What it's made of, how it's made (though fortunately not the particulars), the differing types of powders and the uses of each, the effect and development of the weapons, the impact on Europe, Africa and the Americas etc etc. 200-odd pages in fact of what might have been dull but is actually fairly entertaining.

6 out of 10

Hawkwood - Frances Stoner Saunders

Question: What's the similarity between Pablo Escobar and Sir John Hawkwood?
Answer: Both rose from obscurity to infamy by consummate nastiness.
Question 2: What's the difference between them?
Answer 2: In the 14th Century, everyone was being nasty.

And in a nutshell, that is the life story of Sir John Hawkwood, Condottierei.
Hawkwood was one of the thousands of British soldiers discharged at the end of the Hundred Years War between England and France, just one of the many who feared peace more than they feared war. War had been the making of him after all and yet now there was no need for warriors; if not for a richly equipped knight then certainly not for a lowly longbowman like John Hawkwood who owned only his bow and the clothes on his back. Unwilling to go home and unsure what to do in his brave new world, joining the eponymously titled Great Company and becoming a mercenary was the obvious career path. Enough so that he formed his own force, the famed White Company.
But where to go?

How about sunny Italy?

Italy of the early Renaissance was hardly a single entity - riven with faction fighting, dominated by city states such as Milan, Florence, Venice and Rome and growing rich on trade. As well as being temptingly rich targets for plunder, the city states were admirably (to Hawkwood's eyes) pragmatic: not many of their respective populations were much cop at this war malarkey and even fewer had the stomach for it; so why not hire these roving, hardened, experienced multi-national armies to do their fighting for them? And if the cities didn't do it then one of the Popes surely would, if only to try and give his rival a right good kicking. Perfect.
And so began a career that would see this humble archer rise to become one of the richest and skilled warriors in the whole of Europe - enough so that on his death no lesser person than the King of England himself demanded that his body be repatriated.

Saunders' account is a thing of beauty; there's as much politics and diplomacy as there is outright brawling and Hawkwood is shown to be effective at all 3 when the picture of a 14th Century mercenary (or at least the one I received in school) is generally of a frequently drunken maniac who delights in breaking things and picking fights with his own side. Apart from one glaring episode that gained him widespread notoriety (ironically enough when in the Pope's service) Hawkwood seems to have had a firmer grasp on the concepts of loyalty and honour than most of his higher-stationed contemporaries, again giving the lie to the thick-headed mercenary picture. When he was called on to draw his sword, however, he was almost chillingly effective and hardly ever beaten throughout his career.

This is a wonderful read - fast paced and atmospheric enough to grab your interest and keep it, yet subtle enough that by the end of it you get the feeling of learning something without actually doing much work. The Holy Grail of Military History if ever there was one.

7 out of 10

Tools of War - Jeremy Black

Okay, here's a challenge for you; first compile a list of the inventions of military usage that mankind has devised since the year dot. Then, from that massive list, pick 50 or so that you think have made the biggest impact on the world and it's goings on.
Third challenge - justify them.

Tough call, ain't it?

Have no fear of being swamped in dusty cupboards though, Jeremy Black has done all the work for you, including sections on Stone and Metal (the very first weapon of all was surely a lump of stone plonked onto someone elses' head), Shields, Armour, Chariots, Siege Engines, the Macedonian Sarissa, the Roman Gladius, Stirrups, Longbows, Gunpowder, Rifles, Bayonets, the Minie Ball, Railways, Steamships, Radio, the Machine Gun, Ironclad ships, Submarine and the Torpedo amongst many others. This is how he justifies picking the longbow:

"Experienced archers could manage 8 to 10 arrows a minute. With this shooting rate, the 5,000 English archers on the field of battle that day could launch 40,000-50,000 arrows a minute, or 700 a second. French infantry and cavalry alike were decimated under the barrage of deadly missiles, and the Battle of Crecy was won for the loss of only 200 English soldiers, to nearly 10,000 French dead. The conquest of France beckoned..."

So, was the longbow the most significant weapon in the course of history? Or the iron sword, stirrup or chariot that allowed the victories of the great early empires of the East? Though gunpowder, the flintlock and the Gatling gun caused more carnage, did they cause swifter victory? And could anything compare to the effects - militaristic and economic - of the mass military industrialization of the World Wars, with tank, B52, V rocket ...and the atomic bomb? Or must all bow before the new weapons of stealth and precision of the 'military information age'? "Tools of War" tells, chronologically, the stories of 50 of the most significant advances in military technology and, in doing so, provides an insight into the history of warfare and conquest.
Each chapter focuses on a specific technology, from the Stone Age to the information warfare age, which has conferred a decisive advantage on the user and changed the way in which war is waged. Author Jeremy Black discusses the specific engagements or campaigns where the weapon had most effect, providing the reader with a crash course in military history as well as an overview of world history itself.

An interesting little book with a unique slant on many things.

6 out of 10

A Close Run Thing - Allan Mallinson

A little diversion today; the other thing this blog is designed for are reviews of fictional military history, or fictional events in a military context and so it’s about time to do one.

On first inspection there isn’t much to interest the reader about Cornet Matthew Hervey; It’s drawing near the end of the Peninsula campaign of the Napoleonic Wars and Hervey is a junior officer in the light dragoons. He’s got none of the rough edges that make his peers (Sharpe in particular) so engaging – he’s a dutiful, honourable minor gentleman; speaks Greek, German and Latin, conscientious, well-educated, a firm favourite in the officer’s mess, popular with his men, God-fearing, never swears, loves his mother and father, adores his sister and secretly pines for the brunette beauty who lives down the road – he is, in short, a paragon of all the virtues and disgustingly perfect. So why is he so engaging?
The answer comes partly from his profession – being a soldier amidst the mud, blood and carnage of a Napoleonic battle was never the gentlest of occupations – but mostly from the way he interacts with other people, particularly said beauty. The son of a vicar is minor gentry himself and yet she is so far above his station it’s a wonder that he can see her petticoat, let alone anything else and the stumbling way that he pursues his adoration, deals with a rival suitor and gets wrapped in the enigma that she gleefully spins for him is enough to make anyone feel more than a hint of “I’ve been there myself, mate”.
It’s also the situations and the sheer scope of them that add to the intriguing nature of Mallinson’s first book. Hervey serves in Southern France, Ireland and England before the great denouement at Waterloo and runs into nuns, crofters, idiots, ex-cavalrymen, high aristocracy, churchmen, soldiers and a sergeant and groom who both speak a nigh-impenetrable strain of Tyneside.

It would have been all to easy and, one suspects, very tempting to pitch this epitome of an officer kicking and screaming into the Hellfire of Waterloo just to see how well he comes out of the other side – Bernard Cornwell does precisely this with Sharpe and his own fictitious regiment – and yet this ex-Colonel doesn’t. Hervey is despatched on a very sneaky sneaky assignment far removed from the smoke of the gunline and so therefore misses the great majority of it. In this he is fortunate, he survives, but does so only due to the self-sacrifice of a sergeant which leads to more wrangling with his conscience. This is actuallty more plausible than many books of this type and so resists the urge to turn this meek man into a hero who positively has to be in every major scrap regardless of what history actually records, thus avoiding the trap that Sharpe for instance and Aubrey for another seem to fall into on a regular basis. It also offers a plausible explanation of what you feel was going on behind the scenes on the 18th June, 1814; the link up with the Prussians and how adroitly it was done.
The best military fiction, especially, the historical type, is that written by once serving soldiers themselves, for they can provide a depth and an insight into the little nuances that a civilain will miss. Being an ex-cavalryman himself though of the armoured variety, Mallinson brings his knowledge of a modern army and translates it very well back in time for the simple reason that throughout history soldiers have always acted and thought like soldiers, the quintessential insiders’ club and completely unlike mere civilains.

We have here the horseborne equivalent to Hornblower of the Royal Navy and it’s about damn time.

8 out of 10

First into Action - Duncan Falconer

“I was in my first ambush, waiting to kill 2 men that I had never met before”
And so begins the first of many first hand accounts of unbearable tension that litter Duncan Falconer's personal memoir.
Special Forces are a tricky subject at the best of times, always anxious to remain out of the public eye as much as possible and yet the Special Air Service, for all it's mystique, has never quite managed to pull it off thanks to a slew of books, TV documentaries and even live footage of them. The Special Boat Service, however, is a different matter.

Their ethos is in almost complete contrast to their more widely known peers and is summed up by their respective motto - "Who Dares Wins" is indicative of derring-do and perhaps the merest touch of swaggering flamboyance, certainly every man is a remarkable example of a soldier.
"By Strength and Guile" is completely opposite; the troopers are just as good (if not actually better in some cases) but there is more than a hint of stealth and secrecy - born out by the simple fact that the books about them are not even the square of those published about their sister force.
There are other diferences as well, chief amongst them being that although the SAS has the enitre army to draw upon for recruits (which must all then be trained to the same standards), the SBS do it solely from the ranks of the Royal Marines (so harmonization of newcomers is a lot easier). This differing ethos is partly because of their specialisation for water-borne environments but, in the Gulf, Northern Ireland, Bosnia and half a hundred other places they've proven that they're not exactly fishes out of water. The Marines have more battle honours than any other unit in the British military.

First into Action is the first Special Boat Services memoir written from the inside. It tells how Duncan Falconer trained with the Royal Marines in Deal before being recruited into the SBS at Poole in Dorset. The regimen of ruthless training is graphically described and the book also includes revelatory accounts of SBS operations in Ulster, Bosnia and the Gulf War, and of the intense rivalry between the SAS's individualist mentality and the more team-based, marine ethos of the SBS. Duncan Falconer's grippingly detailed memoir is sure to command the attention of anyone interested in the Special Forces and how they operate.

It's not solely bullets and grenades though, as with any military autobiography there are moments of the humour unique to men under arms and there are more whimsical moments as well, all culminating in a simple yet complex problem; what do you do with a supremely trained fighting man when you get rid of him? One moment RSM with all the status that that implies, the next moment faceless civilian with no job.

7 out of 10

Barbarians - Terry Jones

Any book with an ex-Python involved with it is going to be a fun read anyway. When said ex-Python is also a formidable Historian in his own right, even a TV tie-in book becomes worth it.

Terry Jones offers us an alternative view of the Roman Empire; many believe that the Romans were, in terms of technology and progressive thought, the greatest thing since sliced bread. Balls. They were indeed very good, but what they were really good at was unashamed looting of ideas that weren't their own, imposing their version of events on everyone else, beating seven shades of Hell out of anyone who said different or failing that, rewriting history to blot out people who were just as good at kicking arse as they were.
So I for one never heard much detail about the Celts, the Huns, the Palmyrians and the Visigoths whilst at school and nor, I suspect, did many. Oh I knew they existed but was always of the impression that they were weak little proto-kingdoms who were no match for the might of Rome and her Legions of professional soldiers.

But as Jones says himself, it wasn't like that. It wasn't like that at all.

And for 260 always entertaining and frequently enlightening pages he goes to some lengths to point out why this is so. Jones may have started as a comedian, but the man can do his research and put across a point as adroitly as anyone I've yet come across - yes, sometimes you get the feeling this was written with an eye more towards entertainment than scholarship but there are some serious points made here, some of them making for rather uncomfortable reading at times but such will always happen when preconcieved notions are swept away. E.g: we have the recieved wisdom that when the Goths entered Rome they sacked, looted and burned every square inch of it. The reality is that not even the Roman version of a garden fence was knocked over - on pain of death, what is more.
We also have the notion that no power in the East was equivalent to the military might of Rome. But the Pathians and Sassanians inflicted Rome's heaviest defeats since Hannibal some centuries before - perfume and jewellery wearing generals notwithstanding.

Jones (and his co-writer Alan Ereira) attempts nothing short of rewriting the history books, albeit in a minor way, and produces what is surely one of the most thought provoking books that I've read in a long time and, I suspect, in your time as well.

7 out of 10

Berlin - Antony Beevor

"That's how Berlin is going to look!" - These words, screamed at his prisoners by a Soviet officer in the ruins of Stalingrad neatly sum up the whole premise of this book; encapsulating in a single sentence all the hate, despair, shattered hopes and lust for vengeance planted by the German Sixth Army on the shores of the Volga in 1943.

That I am a devout fan of Beevor's work is already a matter of record - see my review of Stalingrad - but I always wondered after finishing it how he was going to match it's breathtaking scope and detail and the sheer hubristic tragedy of it all. Turns out that I needn't have worried.
The Red Army had much to avenge when it finally reached the frontiers of the Reich in January 1945. Political commissars rammed home the message of Wehrmacht and SS brutality. The result was the most terrifying example of fire and sword ever known, with tanks crushing refugee columns under their tracks, mass rape, pillage and destruction. Hundreds of thousands of women and children froze to death or were massacred because Nazi Party chiefs, refusing to face defeat, had forbidden the evacuation of civilians. Over seven million fled westwards from the terror of the Red Army. Antony Beevor reconstructs the experiences of those millions caught up in the nightmare of the Third Reich's final collapse, telling a terrible story of pride, stupidity, fanatacism, revenge and savagery, but also one of astonishing endurance, self-sacrifice and survival against all odds.

It's easy to lose sight of the fact that wars involve individuals, each with their own hopes, fears and desires. Berlin: the Downfall, 1945, is Antony Beevor's account of the bloody Götterdämmerung that brought the Second World War in Europe to an end, and in which he has fused the large and the small scale effects of war. Beevor paints the broad picture of Marshals Zhukov and Konev, competing for glory and Stalin's attention, as they race their armies towards Berlin. He gives the reader a gripping account of the brutal street-by-street fighting in the German capital and provides an unforgettable portrait of the last, insane days of Hitler and his entourage in the bunker.
His attention to emotional detail is what made his previous book such a magnificent work, combining sweeping hisorical narrative with high human drama. Yet he also highlights the small details of ordinary people caught in the nightmare of history -the sick children evacuated at the last minute from a Potsdam hospital; the Soviet soldiers shaving themselves for the first time in weeks so that they would make appropriately presentable conquerors; and the Nazi Youth teenagers peddling their bikes in despairing, last-ditch attacks against the Red Army's tanks.
The story Beevor tells is an almost unremittingly terrible one--one of death, rape, hunger and human misery--but he tells it with an alertness to individuality. The result is a masterpiece of narrative history that only narrowly gives the crown to his previous book, and that purely because after Stalingrad, everyone knew what Beevor was capable of.

9 and 3/4's out of 10